Film Shows How Henry Sultan Saw Himself Year After Year
by Corrie M. Anders, The Noe Valley Voice, February 2024 issue
A film featuring a prominent Noe Valley artist will have its world premiere this month during the 26th San Francisco Independent Film Festival. Henry “Hank” Sultan, a long-time Sanchez Street resident, stars as himself in the documentary short, titled I Never Was a Hippie—I Just Looked Like One. The film is among 55 short films and 35 full-length features—from 15 coun-tries—to be screened Feb. 8 to 18 at the Roxie and Four-Star Theaters. Sultan, 85, is an eclectic artist whose works include paintings, masks, and murals. He has also published 50 works in The Art of the Mandala (Last Gasp, 2014), his musings on the Sanskrit “cir-cle within a square” art form. The film focuses on Sultan’s life in self-portraits, “revealing an offbeat artistic journey mixed with humor and social commentary,” says Adriana Marchione, who co-directed the short with editor Kirk Goldberg and the “ani-mation wizard that is Toshi Onuki.” Marchione, who lives a block away from Sultan, and Goldberg, a nearby Mission District resident and broadcast media professional, launched the proj-ect while Sultan was still grieving over the passing of his wife of nearly five decades, Jennifer Badger Sultan, also a celebrated artist. She died of lymphoma in 2021. Sultan narrates the 17-minute pro-duction, much of it filmed in his home studio. He says he began doing self-portraits in the early 1970s as a form of therapy. He liked painting them, he said, so he could “express my joker side and my snarky attitude.” In the film, he said he had acne as an adolescent, and “the mirror was not my friend.” So the paintings “helped me to see my real persona.” He tried to paint at least one new portrait every year. In 2005, Sultan fin-ished a series he called the “persecution complex.” For his 73rd year, he painted himself as “a Luddite in an electronic wonder-land.” In the 2016 self-portrait, Sultan is looking over the pages of an art book while sitting in a chair, prompting him to reflect: “I am 78, and it’s great to tell jokes about a grumpy old Jewish man and realize that is who I am.” The last of the film’s portraits, paint-ed in 2022, echoes a painting from 30 years earlier. Sultan says, “It was telling me I could move on, and I’m doing just that…but very slowly.” The film will air Saturday, Feb. 10, at 2:15 p.m., at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St. Marchione, Goldberg, and Sultan all plan to attend. For information about the rest of the festival lineup, go to sfindie.com. The films can be seen virtually as well, at sfindie2024.eventive.org.